Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella Read online

  "That's right, sir."

  "Good God," the woman said. "Why?"

  Dev stiffened. "I'm qualified to ceph the K-T jobs. I want to be a starship—"

  "Glitter and gold, pretty uniforms, and a jackin' Jill on every planet," Alessandro said, her words biting. "Tradition and glory! What makes you think the navy'd have you?"

  Dev bristled, stung by her scorn. "They'll have me, ma'am. I'm good."

  "The correct form of address for all senior officers is 'sir,' " Fisher reminded him. "Cameron, I'm afraid I have bad news. Your MSE threw a flag, point four on your TM rating. The navy can't use you."

  He seemed to wait for a response, but Dev had none to give. The shock of Fisher's quiet bombshell twisted his gut, leaving throat dry and brain numb. He gaped at the two of them. "Sir, I—" He stopped. "That's impossible!" he finished.

  "There's nothing personal in a Mental Stability Evaluation," Fisher said. He paused, as though considering what to say. "And a Psychotechnic Disorder flag isn't necessarily a downcheck. But it is something that anyone who employs you as a linker is going to have to take into consideration."

  He met Fisher's level gaze. "That point four . . . is that bad?"

  "Not necessarily. Not for most jobs. If it was technophobia, now, that could be a problem, but TM? Hell, all of us have a touch of that. But it does rule you out for starships."

  Dev opened his mouth, realized he was gaping foolishly again, and snapped it shut. "Kichigai!" The word was one he'd picked up in the barracks. Literally it meant "you're crazy," but in Nihongo it came close to being a fighting word. "I've been jacking a freighter for two years!"

  "I'll ask you to control yourself, Cameron," Fisher said coldly. "With your TM rating, I'm surprised even a civilian merchant line would offer you a job. The navy won't take anyone with a TM higher than point two."

  Orion Line, Dev thought grimly, was not exactly in the same league as Nipponspace, but this was the first time he'd even considered the possibility that the navy wouldn't take him.

  "Look," he said. "It's got to be a mistake. I was second helm on the Mintaka. She's still at Asgard. Call and talk to Captain DeWitt!"

  "Tell me, Cameron," the woman said suddenly. "What do you feel when you're in the godsea?"

  "Huh?" The sudden change of subject had caught him off guard. "It's like . . . like nothing I could describe. Not in words. It's flying . . . and power—"

  "Ah." She nodded. "There's the magic word. Power. You feel big when you're linked, don't you? Powerful. Invulnerable."

  "I guess so."

  "Like you could take on the universe. That's why jackers flagged for TM are pretty carefully scrutinized when they're bucking for lead helm. Think you could pass muster?"

  Dev didn't answer at once. Second helm aboard a merchant ship was a reserve position, basically little more than a training slot. He'd passed his shipboard tests and qualified for all watch-standing duties, but twice he'd been passed over for promotion to first helm.

  He'd assumed that DeWitt had downchecked him because of petty dislike, or, more likely, because of who his father was. Now, for the first time, he was considering the possibility that it was an MSE result that had blocked his advancement. Captain DeWitt had never said anything, one way or the other, but . . .

  "So what are you saying, sir? That the Hegemony Guard won't have me?" He was already wondering if DeWitt would take him back. He doubted it, especially if there was something in his MSE. "It's like I was a criminal or something."

  "Not quite," Alessandro said. "We've got plenty of slots for someone aggressive like you. Someone who doesn't mind taking chances when he's jacked."

  "But I'm a starpilot!"

  "Not anymore," Fisher said. "You know, son, with your jack configuration, you'd be a natural with heavy ViRface equipment. You ever jack transports, loaders, anything like that?"

  "No." Dev saw where the conversation was headed.

  "With a TM of point four, you'd be perfect for striders," Alessandro said. "I'm short some people, and your stats look pretty good to me."

  That was the second time someone had told him that. "No way! I don't want to be a striderjack!"

  Fisher turned tired eyes on Dev. "Look, son, here's the straight hont. If you don't want striders, you can go to the line infantry, or you can try for a tech rating. Meditech. Maybe ViRtech. If you wash out of school, though, you head straight for the combat pool. They'll be fitting you for your CA."

  CA—Combat Armor—lightweight, nano-grown hard-shells little heavier than a standard environmental suit. Crunchies. The word, and Castellano's mockery, burned in Dev's memory.

  "If you choose striders," Fisher continued, "you'll be king of the stack. An officer with a solid career and a good future."

  "A grounder?" he said, deliberately, bitingly sarcastic. "Kicking up dirt clods with a combat walker? The navy's where the real action is, anyway. All you striderjacks're good for is—"

  "Kid, you've been living too many ViRdramas," Alessandro said, cutting in.

  "Well, why do you want me?"

  "There's no shame in having a high TM," Fisher said, answering before Alessandro could. "Hell, some of the psychotechnic disorders are lots worse. Technophobia . . . the fear of technic society. Technic Depression. That's when you know the AIs have left you in the dust and you're never going to catch up. Compared to those, technomegalomania's nothing."

  "I have a TM rating of point three," Alessandro added. She favored him with a cold grin. "You have to think you're a god if you're jacking sixty tons of walking death."

  It all seemed too cut-and-dried for Dev, a soulless shuffling of numbers that left him, and what he wanted, out of the equation entirely.

  "Frankly, son," Fisher continued, "with your MSE scores and your implants, I'd jump at the chance. The navy's not going to look twice at you with a point four TM. They want cold, calm, and steady people guiding their billion-yen babies through the godsea. Not warriors."

  "Hell," Alessandro said. "I doubt that the tech services would be that thrilled to get you either. Looks to me like you can put in for striders, or stick with the line infantry."

  This was some kind of nightmare, a horror ViRdrama without an exit code. "What kind of goddamned choice is that?"

  "No choice at all, I'd say. You don't want to be an enlisted grunt, do you?"

  "But I have to palm for more than five years if I want striderjack!"

  "Two extra years," Fisher agreed. "But think of the benefits . . . "

  Dev scarcely listened as Fisher ran through the litany of higher pay, faster promotion, and brighter glory. Fisher had been right on one point. He didn't want to be an enlisted man if he had a chance at wearing gold. Better to give orders than to take them, and as a striderjack, at least he'd have some decent armor around him.

  "And you might get another crack at the navy," Fisher concluded. "After you qualify as a cadet."

  "How do I do that?"

  "Take another MSE. Your score could change with training, with discipline, or just because your attitude changes. It's possible to reprogram your own selfware, you know."

  " Selfware?"

  He pointed at Dev's head. "Your brain is wetware, the organic counterpart to your implant hardware. Selfware is the program your wetware runs. You know, most people have several distinct sets of overlapping selfware that they run at different times. There's Cameron the freighter pilot. Cameron the lover, out on the town for a bit of RJ. Cameron the son of Admiral Cameron—"

  "What's the point?" he snapped, angry now.

  "In most people, there's a fair amount of overlap between selfware programs. If there's no overlap, you get multiple personalities, severe mental disorders, stuff like that. Too much overlap, and you're inflexible, rigid, unable to adapt. Your scores suggest the latter."

  "He's saying you have a bad attitude, Cameron. Rigid. Set in ferrocrete. But I can fix that."

  He glanced at her suspiciously, then looked back at Fisher. "But I might be abl
e to transfer to the navy later?"

  "Possibly." Fisher shrugged. "We've been hardwiring humans to machines for four centuries. Hardware, software, that's no problem. It's the selfware that's still the mystery. Mostly it's what you make of it yourself."

  In the end Dev agreed. It was the only thing he could do.

  Dev returned to Barracks Three to pick up his gear and was thankful to find that the entire company had been marched off for more evaluations. The only one left in the building was Castellano.

  "PBI," Castellano said, rising from his bunk. "Am I right? I can see it just from your face."

  "Shows what you know," Dev said, putting as much of a sneer into the words as he could manage. He was tempted to save face, but Castellano had a way of rinding things out, and Dev didn't want to give the guy the satisfaction of seeing through a lie. "They made me an officer."

  "Hah! I should've known! A goddamn clanker!"

  An hour before, Dev had wanted to pound Castellano's face in, but he found himself not caring now. He was still digesting a one-eighty course change in what had been a carefully planned career.

  "Beats being a crunchie," Dev said.

  "Sure it does," Castellano agreed. "Until they wash you out. When you can't handle the shit they're dumping on you, they'll fit you for a CA-suit so fast, your head'll swim."

  Dev looked at the older man with new insight. "That's what happened to you, isn't it?"

  He shrugged. "I screwed up once, and they dropped me in the infantry. Six months later I saw my best friend grabbed by a Xeno stalker and goddamned eaten, his legs, anyway, and he was there on the ground screaming for me to shoot him, and I couldn't do anything but run 'cause the thing was reaching for me! . . ."

  Castellano stood there, his hands working at his sides, his eyes wild, as though he were still seeing some invisible horror. Then he relaxed, pulling back that part of self he'd never shown the others in the barracks.

  "Hey." And the voice was gentle now. "I'm sorry. Don't mind me. Good luck, okay?"

  Stiff-backed, he turned on his heel and strode off, whistling tunelessly. Dev packed his gear, checked out at the front desk, and reported to Recruit Training Command.

  He tried not to think about Castellano's eyes.

  Chapter 6

  Now all you recruities what's drafted to-day

  You shut up your rag-box an' 'ark to my lay,

  An' I'll sing you a soldier as far as I may:

  A soldier what's fit for a soldier.

  —"The Young British Soldier"

  Rudyard Kipling

  early twentieth century

  'Toes on the line! On the line, you norking brain-burned slugs! That's the long, straight white thing painted on the floor! Eyes front! We're going to pretend you assholes are soldiers and pretend you know how to stand at attention!"

  Dev stumbled into line with the others. The night had been a short one, ended at an obscene hour.

  The drill instructor paced before them as they shuffled into line, head erect, back and shoulders as rigid as duralloy, khakis spotless and razor-creased, with more ribbons on his left chest than Dev had known existed.

  "I am Socho John Randolph Maxwell," the DI thundered. "But as far as you are concerned, I am God! Do you understand?"

  There was a mumble of assent from the ragged line of men and women, some of whom were still tucking civilian shirts or tunics into trousers. Most looked blank, dazed, or simply confused.

  "When I ask you if you understand," Maxwell continued with scarcely a pause, "you will answer, in unison, 'Linked, sir!' Do you understand?"

  "Yes, sir!" "Linked, sir!" "Yessir! . . . "

  "What was that?"

  "Linked, sir!"

  "Goddamn my audio feed must be out! I still didn't hear that!"

  "LINKED, SIR!"

  Maxwell was not a large man, no more than 172 centimeters, and he had the build of a comjacker, small and compact and lean. But his throat must have had built-in amplifiers, for Maxwell could roar orders and insults without seeming to raise his voice, delivering a whipcrack of precision and authority that captured the recruits' attention as completely as a full sensory feed. He had a cadence to the way he spoke that was fascinating, a way of stressing key words that put tremendous feeling into them. Dev wondered if Maxwell really meant what he said, or if he was simply a consummate actor.

  "You have been assigned to me for six weeks of basic military indoctrination, after which you will be assigned to field training with an active unit. Ladies and gentlemen, during this next six weeks you will come to hate me, but that's okay because all I have to do is weed out those of you who are unfit to be officers and striderjacks. What the infantry does with you after I am finished with you, I don't care.

  "My job is to find those few of you who might make halfway decent officers for the Guard warstrider regiments. It is a difficult and demanding job, requiring as it does the sifting of several tons of worthless rock for a few grams of gold. Sometimes the job is impossible, and having seen the bunch of you this morning, I am very much afraid that that is the case with this company of miserable, scuzzbutt recruits! Never, ever in all my career seen such a batch of misbegotten rejects and genetic mistakes! Officers! God help me, I never realized our side was this desperate!"

  Maxwell continued his pace from one end of the barracks line to the other. Two corporals stood impassively at parade rest by the door.

  "This, people, and I use that term with extreme reluctance, is Company Six-forty-five, Third Battalion, Second Regiment of the Midgard Recruit Training Brigade, First Hegemony Guard. Do you understand?"

  "LINKED, SIR!"

  "I am God. Do you understand?"

  "LINKED, SIR!"

  "Gocho Vincetti and Gocho Delaney are my assistants. You will obey their orders as you would obey me. Understand?"

  "LINKED, SIR!"

  "You! Scumface. What's your name?"

  "Uh, Hal Morley, sir," a scared-looking kid four down the line to Dev's left said.

  "No, Uh-hal Morley. You are Seito-recruit Morley, and if you have something to say to me, the first word I want to hear out of your scumface is the word sir! Do you understand?"

  "Linked, sir!"

  "What?"

  "SIR, LINKED, SIR!"

  "You are all seito-recruits! Seito-hojohei, for those of you with any Nihongo. Seito means 'officer cadet.' Seito-recruit means that someday, maybe, maybe, you will have a chance to be a cadet officer and drive warstriders . . . but only if you make it past me!

  "This morning there are thirty-five of you. Normally I would expect ten or twelve of you to make it as far as a field training assignment, but now that I've seen this pathetic lot of NORC-Socket cripples, I have to say that I'm going to be lucky to get one! You! With the hair! What's your name?"

  "Sir, Seito-recruit Jacobsen, sir!"

  "Why are you here?"

  "Sir, I want to jack warstriders, sir!"

  "Bullshit! You couldn't jack a flatloader down a cargo ramp!" Maxwell turned sharply, his finger jabbing at Dev's face. "You! Why are you here?"

  Dev swallowed, forcing himself to keep his eyes riveted on the wall he was facing, knowing that to meet the eyes of this wiry monster in uniform would invite attack. "Sir, I . . . I'm not really sure, sir!"

  "Ha! Honest, at least. You're too stupid to know why you're here! You're all too stupid to know. Well, I'm gonna tell you why you're here! You're here because each and every one of you just made the biggest goddamned mistake of your miserable lives by thinking that any of you could possibly be officers! Could possibly be soldiers! You could have joined the techies! You could have joined the goddamned navy! But no, you decided to come here and play soldier!"

  He stopped, hands on hips, shaking his close-cropped head for dramatic effect. "Maybe they'll be able to find a place for you in a labor battalion once you wash out of here. I don't know, and I don't much care, because once you people wash out, you'll be someone else's nightmare!

  "But for ri
ght now, we're going to make sure you're healthy while I'm doing my very best to kill you! I want you out of those civvie clothes! Now! Everything! Lay 'em out in front of you, neat pile, footgear on top. C'mon, move it! Move it! Get it off!"

  Reluctantly at first, then faster as Maxwell continued his tirade, Dev stripped off boots, coverall, and underwear, arranging them on the floor as directed.

  "I'm waiting, people! Don't be shy! Ain't none of you got one damned thing I ain't seen plenty of before! Okay, right face! That's right face, you numbskull! Follow Gocho Vincetti out that door! C'mon, c'mon, single file, nuts to butts! Nuts to butts! You seito-recruits of the female persuasion'll just have to make do the best you can without nuts, and close it up!"

  They shuffled ahead, Maxwell goading them along with sarcasm and scorn. "Aw, don't tell me you scuzzbutts're embarrassed! Let me tell you something! You people are not people. You are not men. You are not women. You are scuzzbutts, and you will be treated as such until you convince me otherwise or I kick your asses out of here! Close it up tight! All of you! Make the guy in front of you smile!"

  Dev learned later that the processional was called the recruits' parade, a seemingly endless single-file shuffle through chill-floored corridors and drafty rooms that would have seemed a lot worse if they hadn't already been in shock from the early reveille and the verbal abuse. Each recruit in turn was probed, prodded, scanned, and repeatedly air-injected in shoulders and buttocks with blood-cell-sized antigenics programmed to hunt down and destroy everything from mutyphant bacilli to malarial parasites.

  After the meditechs were through with them, they were made to stand, one at a time, on a platform with arms and legs spread, as lasers painted their bodies with glowing contour lines. The laserscan theoretically measured them for custom-fitted uniforms, but Dev decided there'd been a mistake when he stepped into his bright yellow coveralls fifteen minutes later and pressed the seal closed. The slick-surfaced garment was at least a size too large for him. The corporal handing out the uniforms just grinned when he complained. "You'll grow," was all she said.